Gothic II Review

Piranha Bytes brings us an action RPG that comes very close to hitting the mark.

AI also has some serious pathfinding problems. You can stand on stairs or ramps where enemies could get to you easily, but half the time they'll just run in a straight line at you, find that you're up a little bit and then run around in circles or straight into a wall. Good pathfinding would have them find the ramp or stair beginning and run up to attack you. This fault can be easily exploited to make sure that only one enemy at a time can attack you. Enemies will also get stuck on objects in the world fairly easily. There were more than a few occasions where enemies were running in place while stuck on a bench or a log or some such thing.

One of the good things about the AI of characters that makes the world in general more interesting is the day/night cycle. All of the characters and monsters will recognize the time of day. Citizens in towns and workers on farms will go about their daily routines which include working, eating, relaxing a bit, talking to other NPCs, and eventually sleeping. Monsters in the wilderness have their sleep cycle with many creatures sleeping at night and others sleeping in the day. Some of the quests in the game will actually take advantage of the cover of darkness challenging you to sneak into certain areas to steal objects. Nighttime also has its own perils thanks to a very dark world. Unless you're carrying a torch or have used a light spell, you'll be walking blind half of the time. Or you can be lame like me and turn the gamma up a bit and use it like night vision goggles. Either way, finding a bed and sleeping until the appropriate time of day to complete whatever mission you're on will help quite a bit.

But all of these objects that enemies get stuck on are half of the greatness of the world in which Nameless runs around. The world is simply full of objects. Trees, undergrowth, logs, rocks, mushrooms, chests, barrels, boxes, tents, poles, houses... you name it. All of this makes the experience pretty fun. There are a lot of monsters and NPCs running around in the world as well. None of them are fantastic looking, but all are definitely acceptable. Animations for each of these can be a bit clunky, but are passably good for the most part. Particle and spell effects are also decent, if not impressive, but considering the Gothic II originally came out a year ago in Europe, that's not very surprising. Gothic II isn't the prettiest game around, but its environments are good enough to entertain and immerse.

The unfortunate side effect of so much being on screen at the same time is slowdown. If you have a good computer, you'll find that the game runs fairly smoothly as long as the view distance isn't pumped up as far as it can go. Even on a 3GHz machine with 1 gig of RAM and a GeForceFX 5900 Ultra, Gothic II will have slowdown issues with everything pumped up all the way, especially if the rain begins to fall. On a 1.4GHz with 512MB of RAM and a GeForce3, slowdown is a regular occurrence, even with settings turned down quite a bit. This is definitely something to think about if you're thinking about buying this.

There's a lot of different graphics in the world, but there are also a ton of sound bites. Every NPC in the game has a speaking voice. Of course, many of them will be overused for general NPCs that don't have a lot to say, but this is made up for by the huge amount of dialogue found within. The strange thing about the dialogue, which has struck everyone that has wandered by and seen me playing the game, is that you certainly aren't going to get the typical fantasy world British accents here. There are a lot of Southern accents, Texan accents, East Los Angeles accents, Bronx and Brooklyn accents, Midwestern fare, and some normal Hollywood American accents as well. It's a very strange mix that can be entertaining, but is always weird. It's hard to get used to hearing a guy in plate armor with a bastard sword speak like he's about to start praising the Confederacy. I happened to like this bizarre twist but it seemed that many people around the office didn't. Either way, the bytes that are there range from good to average anyway. But nobody is going to be winning a voice-over award here like the Nathan Zachary character from Crimson Skies should.

The Verdict

Gothic II has some great content and quest progression lying underneath an incredibly clunky exterior. If the combat didn't have such a high learning curve, the difficulty ramped up a bit slower, and the interface wasn't terrible, this would be a pretty good game. There's a lot of game here that would certainly appeal to the action/RPG crowd. I'm not sure why it's so hard to create useable and fun melee combat in a third-person RPG made for the PC, especially with so many great examples to look at, but Gothic II certainly makes you wish for some. It could have been a really great and fun game. As it is, it has some really good things and some really annoying things that make average to good gaming experience on the whole.